1.
“You mean we aren't going to pursue it further?” Wade asked, setting down the paper bag full of books.
“No,” Algernon clarified, “We aren't. Our part of the process is done.”
Wade's face soured, as he settled his tall frame into the chair opposite of Algernon's desk.
“We're...glorified repo men?”
Algernon smiled, sadly.
“That's about the size of it. But we got two hundred dollars out of the deal. Seventy-five of that is yours, plus bus fare. Not bad for a day's work, is it?”
“Suppose not.”
Algernon opened his desk drawer, removed a bottle of rotgut whiskey, a handful of bullets, two plastic cups, and a checkbook.
Pouring two fingers into one and a single into the other, he opened the checkbook.
“I'm going to write this out for you now. Mari's going to remove twenty bucks of it for rent, but she'll give you the fifty-five.”
Wade nodded.
“Sounds fair enough,” he said, watching Algernon's pen scratch at the paper.
2.
ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.
Wade woke up the next morning, and rolled his sleeping bag into a tight bundle which he deposited in the corner. Stretching, he opened The Grapes of Wrath, and flipped through six random pages before finding a suitable underlined quote:
Tom grinned. "It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do."
He grabbed his towel and a change of underwear, then headed into Algernon's office, into the bathroom. After showering, he brushed his teeth and changed clothes. He'd been wearing the same outfit—the jeans, flannel and t-shirt with “NOMAD” on a patch over his heart—all three days thus far.
Now, He put the jeans back on, but forwent the t-shirt, wearing the flannel over his white undershirt.
Returning to his room, he gathered his things into his pockets, leaving the keys to his lost car sitting on top of his backpack.
He headed out the back, into the chilly mountain air, and began to walk.
Eventually, he thought, I'll have to buy a coat.
At the end of the block was his destination, the convenience store.
A man wearing a name tag that said “Greg” leaned against the counter, reading a magazine.
Wade picked up an apple, and tossed it from hand to hand as he walked toward the clerk.
“This, and a phone card, please,” he said.
“How much?” the clerk asked.
“Ten bucks.”
Paying for his goods, he stepped outside, and examined his pack of cigarettes. He still had half left, enough to get him through that day and maybe the next.
He ate his apple as he stood by the pay phone. Dropping the core into a trashcan, he walked over to the phone, and dialed the number of his parents' house.
It rang four times before someone picked it up.
“Hello?” his mother answered.
“Hey, mom,” Wade said, resting his elbow on top of the pay phone.
“Wade! You haven't called in a week!”
He smiled, nervously, even though she couldn't see his face.
“Yeah, mom, I know. My car broke down a couple days ago, and I've been in a city in...either Colorado or New Mexico. I'm not sure; I'd never heard of it before.”
There was the sound of his mother moving around from the other end of the line.
“Are you alright?” she asked, “how's the money holding out?”
He nodded, despite the purely auditory nature of their conversation.
“My money's fine. Some good Samaritans have given me a bit of work while I save up for a used car.”
“What happened to your old one?”
He licked his teeth, thinking of how to approach the delicate issue.
“It broke down by the side of the road, and I walked back to the last town, looking for a gas station. There wasn't one, so I walked back toward my car...and I couldn't find the turn-off. It was dark and freezing cold...”
His mother let out an exasperated sigh, on the other end of the line.
“Well, what are we going to do, Wade?”
Rolling his eyes, he suppressed a countering sigh, though it would've been closer to a growl.
“We're not doing anything. I've got a job, and I'm working through it. The solution is set and in the works, mom.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“What's wrong?” he asked.
“We got a letter from the bank, yesterday. They're foreclosing the house.”
He blinked, the gears in his head spinning wildly to process what he was being told.
“But you're all paid up! I thought you two said it was only going to be another six months...”
“It's not us, it's the bank,” she said.
“They're going under?”
“Yeah.”
“I'll figure something out. A bus ticket should be within my means.”
“And then what?” his mother asked.
“Excuse me?”
“If you come back, you'd just be in the same boat we are, Wade. Your Father and I can get this figured out and handled on our own. Go on...have fun.”
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“I'm not having fun right now, mom. I'm living. I get what you're saying, and I understand. I'll wire some money back to you sometime soon.”
“You don't need to do that,” she protested.
“Yes, mother. I do.”
3.
For the remainder of the day, Wade wandered the city. He padded down alleyways and leveled stony looks at the one or two Hashshishin that thought to dog him.
The city streets lay out before him, the vessels, veins, and arteries of some vast living thing with mountains for bones, organs not coded by something inherent to the blood, but crafted by architects.
He felt like an intruder. A bacterial cell within the vast city-leviathan-thing.
Eventually, he passed out of Little Masyaf, into Old Gaol. Middle-class homes reared up around him, and he eventually found himself in a park.
A wide-open patch of greenery on a mountainside in the high desert; its incongruity drew him into it.
The paths were white concrete, and the grass was wild and ragged, but short.
Wade sat down on a bench in the shade, and lit a cigarette. He examined the burning cylinder, held between the first and second fingers of his left hand.
The park was empty and serene. Wade watched as a hummingbird fed at the flowers thirty feet away.
It flitted closer, and he saw that it was actually a strange-looking moth. It hovered upward, dodging back and forth, as if examining him, then zipped away.
Wade knew, though, that it was looking at him with kinship: another strange, out-of-place creature, pretending to be what it wasn't.
He brought the cigarette back to his mouth, and drew in another lungful of smoke that tasted like poisoned milk. He exhaled through his nose, and smelled home.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stone pavilion, a memorial to some local tragedy, or battle, or miracle. He turned to look at it; adobe columns supported a brass-plated dome. From it emerged a figure.
A tall, thin man with dark blond hair wearing a sweater vest, slacks, a white shirt.
Horn-Rimmed Spectacles.
Wade's eyes dilated as he looked at that man who had brought him to Valley City.
The syringe; the wound on his neck.
Wade knew this man had done something to him, but could not recall what.
Up from his bench, and after him, then.
Wade waited for him to turn away and crushed out his cigarette on the gleaming white concrete path, marking it with a gritty black stain. He shrugged deeper into his flannel shirt, slumping his shoulders.
The man walked westward, down into the valley, down to the river.
Wade followed, as they headed toward the muddy band that passed for the river.
Mari had told him that the River is only properly a river from March to June, when the snowmelt swells it into a wide, sluggish ribbon of water. The rest of the year, it was an undeveloped stretch of muddy ground, with a lightning-quick stream cutting down through the middle.
As they crossed the bridge, Wade looked down at the riverbed. A shantytown had been cobbled together by the so-called homeless, bits of corrugated tin, cardboard and scraps of wood, He could see stray dogs and urchin children wandering around, looking at the chain-link fence the university had put up and picking through the litter thrown from the bridges up above.
Wade was moved with equal parts revulsion and pity, looking at the temporary homes that the poorest of the poor had erected for themselves.
But he quickly turned back to his pursuit of the man with the horn-rimmed glasses.
They passed the university, and walked through the shopping district, as they began to tilt upward. The sun was now overhead, hot and fierce. They'd been walking for three hours or more, and the man had given no sign of seeing him, even when the sun was behind them, and their three shadows mingled.
Now they trudged through the region that Mari had referred to as Venberg, but when he'd seen Algernon write it down in a note to himself, it had been rendered Ven'berg. A largely middle-class neighborhood, like the one that Wade's parents lived in.
Had lived in.
The fatigue he had been expecting never came. His muscles pumped mechanically, but the burning and aching was absent.
The climbed the hill, into a richer part of town. The lots grew and the houses metastasized. The other man climbed up and headed to a big house at the top of the hill.
At the gate, he looked over his shoulder at Wade, and went in, closing it behind him.
Turning, Wade descended the hill, his mind racing to fill in the holes that he had only recently come to recognize. Looking up to the sky, he traced the power lines overhead.
Dangling from one was a large, black shape. It was the size of a cat, but hung like a bat.
He reached into his pocket, and pulled out his camera. Snapping a picture of it, he continued on his way.
4.
The front room of Unreal City was empty, and a thin, pale strain of sunlight drifted in through the tar-stained windows. Algernon sat at the bar, Mari stood behind it, reassembling one of the taps.
“Is Mo still angry with me?” Algernon said, looking down at his plate of food, which consisted primarily of chicken bones and slightly yellowish gravy.
“You did shoot at his cousin,” Mari pointed out.
“Yes, I suppose I did,” Algernon said. He strained, and placed his cast on the bar stool next to him, causing his crutch to shift and clatter to the ground, “I figured that was a socially-accepted response to being thrown off a bridge.”
Mari shrugged, and held up an extra washer that had been left over from her repair option.
“He might not see it that way,” she pointed out.
“What do you think?” he asked her, “why do you let him give me food made up primarily—if not completely—of bones?”
She set the washer down, and leaned toward him, over the bar. His eyes flicked down and took in the view of her cleavage that the position presented him with, before returning his attention to her face.
“Well,” she began, “it's a little funny. I mean, he keeps giving you this terrible food, and you keep coming down here. You can get cheap carry-out, especially with your insurance money and the fact that your new assistant can still bring in cash. But you keep coming down here...why?”
He leaned forward, their faces separated by slightly less than a foot.
“Convenience. Ambiance. A variety of reasons.”
They looked at each other for a second, and Mari drew in breath to speak just as the bell on the door “ding!”ed.
Immediately, she stood up straighter, and leaned back, away from him.
Algernon simply smiled at her, suppressing a laugh.
The two of them looked, and saw Wade enter, he was breathing a little heavier than normal, as if he had quickly run up a flight of stairs.
“Where've you been?” Algernon asked.
“Oh...around. Doing a bit of exploring. Some investigating.”
“Investigating? What were you looking into?”
Wade walked over, righted Algernon's crutch and sat at the stool next to his raised foot.
“The...uh...the guy. The one I hitchhiked in with. I saw him earlier, followed him back to his house.”
Mari's brow furrowed.
“That's called 'stalking,' Wade. It's a little creepy.”
He turned his head, and pointed to the healing scab on the back of his neck.
“You see this? I think that's from a syringe that was in the back seat of his car when I woke up. I think stalking's more acceptable than sticking hitchhikers with hypodermics.”
She looked up and moved her head from side to side.
“Anyway, I saw him in the park just a ways south of here--”
“In Old Gaol? Prison Park?”
He nodded, and continued.
“--and followed him all the way across the city. He didn't take a bus or anything. We got into this area full of big houses--”
“Grimsby,” Algernon supplied.
“Yeah. And he went up to the top of the mountain, to this big Gothic mansion looking place. Then, the fucker looked back at me, like he'd known I was there the whole time.”
Algernon ran his tongue along the furrow between his lower teeth and his lips.
“Carver Manor?” he asked Mari.
“Only 'Gothic mansion' in the whole city,” she concurred.
“What's Carver Manor?” he asked.
“You know how Cleveland has the Rockefellers? And St. Louis has the Busches? Well, Valley City has the Carvers.”
“A political family? Industrialists?” Wade asked.
Mari smirked.
“To use your expression 'A little from column A, a little from column B.' The last of them, a son, Victor, disappeared about ten or twelve years ago, after he graduated from college.”
Wade exhaled forcefully through his nose, and looked down at the bar.
“Can't be this guy. He's only four or five years older than I am.”
Algernon shifted, putting his cast down on the ground again.
“Actually that sounds about right, doesn't it?” he asked.
“You should be telling him this,” Mari said, “you're the expert on local events, and you've got to be ten years older than me.”
“Five, at most. But yeah. He graduated from college at fifteen or something like that. Supposedly pretty smart, but he had cousins on the board of trustees, and his grandmother had been the head of the philosophy department until she died in...'90?”
“'92,” Mari supplied.
“That's right. That's right. Russian woman, right?”
“Yeah. Or Ukranian, or something. One of those Warsaw Pact countries. Came over just after World War II.”
“So...this guy might be Victor Carver? Why would he inject me with something?”
Algernon shrugged.
“Because, as a rule, Carvers are fucking crazy,” Mari offered, “and I'm not talking 'eccentric' crazy,” she turned to Algernon, “remember when the 'Lead Mask' thing came to light, and they had to change the name of the University?”
Algernon laughed, but his eyes were worried.
5.
Victor scanned across the walls with his flashlight, taking in the unused equipment.
Long lines of switches studded the walls, but the wiring had been chewed by rats and the mechanisms gummed up with spiderwebs.
Flasks sat on tables; some still held their liquids, some had been improperly sealed, and held only dust. Many were unmarked, but some bore labels:
“ERGOTAMINE TARTARATE.”
“RED PHOSPHORUS.”
“AQUA REGIA.”
“BUTANOL.”
“RUBIDIUM HYDROXIDE.”
Machines composed of coiling wires and bus bars rose up around him, cobwebs dangling from the fragile components, some over a century old.
“Come out,” Victor commanded, “I know you're down here.”
Something moved behind him, and he turned to face it. The beam of his flashlight fell on nothing but a silhouette in the dust on the wall, like a reversed shadow.
He panned his light across the empty hallway. Nothing moved.
“You can't hide from me forever. I know who you are. I know what you are.”
“I killed you,” a woman's voice whispered from the darkness.
“When?”
“1333.”
“So that would be...1955? No...early 1956. You killed my Great Grandfather Charles. Surely, to one with your senses, I must be distinguishable from him, unless your time down here has diminished you.”
A small woman came into the light; her eyes reflected the flashlight's beam like those of a cat would. Her cheeks were sunken, and her spine seemed to curve, but it looked more to be the effects of hunger than of age.
“I see that it has,” Victor said, “Are you unable to get out of the basement?”
“Not since seventy-seven. I killed and ate the Gurkha, he was the last meal I had. The copper wire and salt encircling the house make a painful threshold. I've had to be satisfied with what I can take from the caretakers and their guests.”
“So you learned not to kill in feeding? That's good. We might be able to come up with a deal, of sorts.”
The woman's yellow eyes did not blink, she simply looked at his face with a certain hunger.
“You know not to approach me, don't you?” Charles said.
“Why would that be? As far as I'm concerned, a meal just walked into my domain.”
She lunged forward, hands outstretched as brutal claws.
Victor raised his left hand revealing a ring with a hexagonal setting that he wore.
The woman halted in her tracks and collapsed in a heap on the ground. A ghostly blue fire emerged in a cross on her back: across her shoulders, and from the crown of her head to the base of her spine.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“If you're not going to help me, Astarte, then I'll put you back where you belong and bring out someone a bit more helpful, who knows their place.”
“I can't...” she said, clutching her throat.
He crouched down next to her, and released some of his hold on her.
“If you swear to serve me, perhaps I'll let you live. Say it... Say it....Say 'I swear.'”
“I...”
“Say it, bitch.”
“I swear...”
With that, he turned his hand, releasing the invisible hold he had on her.
She collapsed to the ground, sobbing in agony.
“You like the ring?” he asked.
“Is it...the original?” she responded.
“Yes. Fascinating, isn't it? I intend for something to happen...and it will. But I understand that, ancient and puissant as this ring is, it is nothing compared to the Devil's Machine that The Magician began and each member of my line, from my Great Grandfather on down, has refined. I want to see it, do you understand? I want to use it?”
He was clutching her head between his hands, grinning down into her horrified face. After a moment, he released her.
“Take me to it. I know that you know the way.”
“It's not down here,” she told him, finally.
“Dammit!” he shouted, echoing throughout the labyrinthine basement.
“But the way to it is. It's a long tunnel. It goes under the river, and to where Charles Carver kept his sensitive materials. He was wise to hide them so well, and so far from his home.”
Victor raised his ringed hand again, and she flinched.
“Up,” he said, and she stood, “I order you to take me there, across the barrier, and to act as if you feel no pain from crossing the threshold that has been erected around the house. You may feed on one man, other than myself, while outside of the barrier. Then, you must return to this basement.”
He lowered his hand, and she stood on wobbly legs for a moment, before turning, and marching mechanically off into the darkness.